Linux Changes, Summer 2007

This page is for sharing information regarding the Fedora 7 upgrade during summer 2007.

emacs differences in fedora 7

Emacs now displays a splash screen by default even if command-line arguments were given. The new command-line option --no-splash disables the splash screen; see also the variable `inhibit-startup-message' (which is also aliased as `inhibit-splash-screen').

To turn off the splash screen on load up add the following to your .emacs file

You may have recently encountered some annoying
changes in emacs, including crazy colors in the mode line and
minibuffer. These are artifacts of the switch from emacs 21 to emacs
22, which came with Fedora 7. Here are a few hints you may find
helpful.

If you don't like the "file foo is large (12MB); really open?" messages,
you can turn them off by adding the following to your .emacs file:

(setq large-file-warning-threshold nil)

The colors are the result of defining new "faces" for several things,
including the minibuffer and mode line. You can see what the various
faces are and what they look like by running

M-x list-faces-display

Then you can change the faces you don't like by adding lines to your
.emacs. If you want the file to continue to work with emacs 21 you'll
need to put the changes inside a conditional. Here's what I did for my
own setup:

Liberation Fonts
F7 includes a set of fonts called "Liberation." These fonts are metric equivalents to some common proprietary true-type fonts. A quick peek seems to indicate they are replacements for Mono, Sans, and Serif. Red Hat is advertising " users will find better cross-platform viewing and printing support for a variety of documents "

Localized Common User Directories (xdg-user-dirs)
This release of Fedora now includes the new common user directory structure, xdg-user-dirs. Features of these new user directories include:

Directory names can be localized (translated)

Includes a set of common directories by default, such as for documents, music, pictures, and downloads.

Appear as common bookmarks in the file browser, and are picked up by many applications as app-specific defaults. For example, a music player would start the file opening dialog in the default music directory.

Configurable by users, who can move or rename the directories via the Nautilus file manager, or by editing ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs.

Removing all dot directories from previous gnome versions allowed new dot directories to be created on login and gnome desktop became functional. Note: still getting xsession-errors written to .xsession-errors but no fuctionality seems lacking... I am kde user though so others will need to test gnome desktop more thoroughly.

Software Update Notifier
Default settings for gnome desktop include a software update notifier popup that should be turned off as it is useless without the root password.
We have identified the service and it should be turned off on production machines.

Test Machine

The machine f7beta1 is currently available for testing via a remote connection. This is identical to a regular office workstation. I'll post a followup when there
is a machine with a console available for testing.

The machine f7beta2 is now available for testing if you need to sit at a console to test. The machine is in the robot lab in the row of machines facing the robots
on the far right.